Samsung Series 5 ultrabook review

Samsung's Series 5 offers yet another take on the extremely slim and stylish ultrabook theme, but tries to distinguish itself with a fine keyboard and mousepad, plus a rather huge 500GB hard drive.

Design

Looks-wise it hasn't gone out of its way to be distinctive, opting for a subdued brushed metal grey throughout -- sensible, but not eye-catching, and ideal for the boardroom, if a tad dull for the design studio. We looked at the 13-inch screen model, but there's also a 14-inch version for an extra £100 which includes a DVD drive.

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It measures a standard 315x219mm and is 18mm deep at its thickest point, making it not the thinnest ultrabook on the market, but far from portly. At 1.43kg it's not the lightest either, but shouldn't strain the muscles of anyone with a fitter constitution than The Simpsons' Montgomery Burns.

It has a decent line-up of ports, including three USB (one of which is high-speed USB 3.0) and there's a cheeky fold-out element to the Ethernet port to cut down on size. There's also a combination headphone/microphone 3.5mm jack (not so good if you want to record and listen with headphones at the same time) and a VGA port for which you'll need the supplied adaptor.

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The 13.3-inch screen has a non-reflective matte finish and looks impressively bright but perhaps not as sharp as it could do. It promises the same 1,366x768 pixel resolution as Toshiba's Portege ultrabook but side by side, the latter is noticeably sharper.

Performance

It shares another other feature with Toshiba's Portege Z830 ultrabook, namely the Intel HD Graphics 3000 card and a very similar Intel Core i5 processor, though this one is backed by 4GB of RAM rather than 6GB. Benchmarking with PCMark 7 delivered a score of 2171, well behind the Toshiba's 2915 and it was noticeably slower in operation -- not tardy by any means, just not quite as fleet. That said, it took just three minutes and 35 seconds to encode an 11-minute video for playback in iTunes, which was nearly a minute faster than the Toshiba could manage.

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The keyboard offers a good-sized range of well-spaced keys and their rubberised plastic is responsive to the touch -- it's a pleasure to use, in other words. The trackpad is exceptionally large, with two buttons at the bottom, though there's no scroll accelerator at the side.

Most ultrabooks come with a solid state drive, but the Series 5 weighs in with a 500GB hard drive. That makes it a bit heavier, and a bit slower, but because HDD is cheaper than SSD it also means plenty of storage for HD movies, and if you need even more, you can expand it via memory card.

If you fancy a spot of 3D gaming, it will do the job, but without exceptional performance -- frame rates measured with FRAPS tended to be around the 60-70fps mark.

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Battery life is okay but not outstanding, delivering around six hours when left running, and a little over three when viewing TV via the web.

Conclusion

The Samsung Series 5 offers a workmanlike casing and contains a machine that's distinctly run-of-the-mill. Performance is okay but not outstanding, as is the screen, and the battery life left something to be desired. That said, it comes at a fully justifiable midrange price.